Michael Doucet
American musician
Michael Louis Doucet (born February 14, 1951) is an American singer-songwriter and musician best known as the founder of the Cajun band BeauSoleil.
Early life
Doucet was born in Scott, Louisiana, to a Cajun family. Family parties in the 1950s always included "French music." Two of his paternal aunts sang ballads, and many family members played musical instruments. He learned banjo at age six, guitar at eight, and belonged to a Cajun rock band with his cousin, Zachary Richard, at twelve.
Career
In his early 20s, Doucet and his cousin went to France, and when he got home he added violin to his music studies. Violin became his primary instrument, though he also plays accordion and mandolin.
In 1975, he started the Cajun band Coteau, and two years later he started BeauSoleil with Kenneth Richard and Sterling Richard. BeauSoleil plays an eclectic combination of traditional Cajun music, blues, country, jazz, and zydeco. Doucet has been a member of a more traditional Cajun band, the Savoy-Doucet Cajun Band with Ann Savoy and Marc Savoy, and Fiddlers 4 with Darol Anger, Rushad Eggleston, and Bruce Molsky. He began teaching in 1977 at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.
The public source identifies “Michael Doucet” as american musician. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Michael, Doucet and American.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 12, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q3308157. VIAF identifies the subject as 37111451. The Library of Congress control number is n86102638. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1951, 1975 and 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michael Doucet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.